The purpose of this thesis is to address the issue of waiting time and waiting list for publicly funded elective surgery in Australia. The three objectives are: (1) to identify demand and supply factors that could significantly affect admissions for elective surgery in public hospitals; (2) to determine if private health care is likely to affect admissions from waiting lists for elective surgery in public hospitals and (3) to re-examine the supplier-induced demand hypothesis.

For the econometric analysis in this thesis, we used the administrative data on waiting time collected by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare to identify significant exogenous factors relating to elective surgery in Australian public hospitals. There were difficulties of missing data and inconsistent procedures in the collection methods used by data providers. Nevertheless, we were able to compile two datasets over the 1998-2005 period, and build nine models to assess the significance of exogenous factors.

Results of our econometric analysis show that the demographic characteristics of the Australian population and the number of local general practitioners had significantly affected the demand for elective surgery in public hospitals. The results also show that the ease of access to private health care did not significantly affect admissions, but available beds in public hospitals were an important exogenous factor. However, changes in the supply level of nurses and total recurrent health expenditure held no linear relationships with admissions from waiting lists. Finally, our econometric results show that the number of surgeons seemed to significantly increase admissions and waiting times. This result may imply an effect of supplier-induced demand.